Research in analytical chemistry continues to enjoy healthy growth as the biological, environmental, and applied sciences place increased emphasis and demands on chemical analysis of biologically active molecules, atmospheric intermediates, and various materials at trace and ultratrace levels. The result of this growth is a demand for well-educated analytical chemists.

The Department of Chemistry provides an outstanding program in this area and the analytical group is currently a leader in pharmaceutical analysis, instrumental techniques for drug discovery and biotechnology, multi-channel instrumentation, laser spectroscopy, separation instrumentation, flow-injection analysis, mass spectrometry, chemometrics, and the application of computers for such tasks as on-line data acquisition and analysis, instrument control, and error detection and correction. Studies aimed at augmentation of the analytical power of infrared spectroscopy are underway. Not only the absorption spectrum, but also the relaxation rates and pathways of decay of the excited states are measured. These methods raise vibrational spectroscopy to a level of capability comparable to that provided to NMR by multidimensional methods.